Way of God’s Arrival

Radner finds part of the fulfillment of the figures of Leviticus 18 in the genealoty of Jesus. On the one hand, Jesus’ own genealogy includes sexually illicit acts (Tamar, Rahab, Bathsheba) and the various sins (not only sexual, but idolatry and oppression) represented in the genealogy eventually lead to Israel’s exile. Yet, “God also achieves a renewal of life through the suffering of mercy and through the maintenance somehow of the line of descent.”

On the other hand, the laws of Leviticus 18 trace out the historical/geneological path of God’s coming into the world: “we ought to see the abominable as including all that rebels against the shape of God’s coming into and passage through the world. And this rebellion is overwhelmed by the coming and passage of God. This is the key: God comes in this particular way, as described in Lev. 18. And this is the nature of the injunctions’ final weight: the world is shaped by this coming. This is the life that the laws provide.”